Professional Documents
Culture Documents
If you are producing, transferring stock, selling, purchasing, doing physical inventory, whatever your activity may be, it
requires certain master data to be maintained.
Example of Master Data
Material master data
Customer master data
Vendor master data
Pricing/conditions master data
Warehouse management master data (storage bin master data)
The ones we will focus in MM module are material master and purchase info record.
Material Master: What you should know about material master?
Material in SAP is a logical representation of certain goods or service that is an object of production, sales, purchasing,
inventory management etc. It can be a car, a car part, gasoline, transportation service or consulting service, for example.
InInIn All the information for all materials on their potential use and characteristics in SAP are called material master. This
is considered to be the most important master data in SAP (there are also customer master data, vendor master data,
conditions/pricing master data etc), and all the processing of the materials are influenced by material master. That is why
it’s crucial to have a precise and well maintained material master.
In order to be confident in your actions you need to understand material master views and its implications on processes
in other modules, business transactions and a few more helpful information like tables that store material master data,
https://www.guru99.com/introduction-to-master-data.html 1/5
9/8/22, 8:28 AM Introduction to Master Data in SAP
transactions for mass material maintenance (for changing certain characteristics for a large number of materials at once).
Material types
In SAP ERP, every material has a characteristic called “material type” which is used throughout the system for various
purposes.
Why is it essential to differentiate between material types and what does that characteristic
represent?
1. It can represent a type of origin and usage – like a finished product (produced goods ready for sale), semifinished
product (used as a part of a finished product), trading goods (for resale), raw materials (used for production of
semifinished and finished products) etc. These are some of the predefined SAP material types among others like
food, beverages, service and many others.
2. We can define our custom material types if any of standard ones doesn’t fulfill our need.
1. Material master views: It defines the views associated with a Material Type. For example, if we have a material type
“FERT” assigned to our material Product 1000 – we don’t want to have Purchasing based views for that material
because we don’t need to purchase our own product – it is configured on material type level.
2. Default price control: we can set this control to standard or moving average price (covered later in detail), but this
can be changed in material master to override the default settings.
3. Default Item category group: used to determine item category in sales documents. It can be changed in material
master to override the default settings.
4. internal/external purchase orders, special material types indicators, and few more.
https://www.guru99.com/introduction-to-master-data.html 3/5
9/8/22, 8:28 AM Introduction to Master Data in SAP
https://www.guru99.com/introduction-to-master-data.html 5/5